Just what she needed. An outing with a man just released from prison.

PEN members today not only gather for literary events in their home countries and internationally but also defend writers and the freedom to write worldwide.

Whatever you do in Turkey, you do it alone.

They looked at me like I was sick.

These are essays with a roving gaze whose authors travel through geographic and intellectual spaces with the same ease with which we used to walk around in New York.

Özdamar knew that arriving in a country with no return ticket meant voluntarily surrendering to an indeterminate foreignness.

There is a surer way for international literature to make us better tourists.

With much of our world deeply divided, stories such as these become more essential than ever to ease our collective pessimism.

We were both quite fat, but Ali’s body carried more promise than mine.

Every night before they went to sleep, the people of the village imagined their own deaths.

“From here on out it’s rooftop to rooftop, hocam.”

I’m twelve years old, I won’t have to do a lot of time, I’ll be out before you know it.

“Erzurum is a wound I carry inside me.”

Did she or her housemates know about the secret of the bathroom?

In the current environment of relentless political strife . . . debate deteriorates into name-calling; partisans morph into zealots, complex issues are reduced to binary terms, and hostility seethes just beneath the surface.

I was bound. I was a registered piece of inventory. I was a liability. I wasn’t going anywhere.

In this troubling context, the need for portrayals of queer lives around the world becomes even more urgent.

© 2017 Beldan Sezen. Translation of the text © 2017 Charlotte Collins. Translation of the signs and newspaper headlines © 2017 Canan Marasligil. All rights reserved.

What do you want us to do, sit on their heads?

Every town had two soccer teams. A right-wing one and a left-wing one.

Comics themselves have a role to play in the construction of a more globally aware social consciousness.

''The clock inside has no numbers, it has only memories.''

Aram's mutilated body on that tree had grown larger and larger in my mind.

You had no name when we met / we did not notice it wasn’t there

We were forced by the state itself to take sides.

If you look in the mirror too long it hits you.

I was more or less enjoying the daytime / I was watching grass sprout from cracks in the asphalt

Under her feet, the boat was shaking and creaking as bigger, stronger waves were beginning to hit it.

Before winter arrives you must / hire a handsome assassin

There, in a corner of the deck over the water, she sits like a ghost, facing away from the sea, silently smoking her cigarette.

It all began on a Thursday evening in November 1989. From that night on, things would never again be the same.

Who taught child's heart cruelty? How were you lured to the poison dish?

He was wearing a pair of threadbare jeans and a checked shirt. There was a cardboard sign hanging round his neck.

The hospital odors do not offend anymore.

Buket Uzuner: I met Claire Messud in Istanbul in November 2007 while she was visiting the city as one of the guest writers of the Istanbul Book Fair. A week before I met her, I started to read her very…

People hold hands . . . this one in front, the other by the feet, the other by and by, a tower of people toward the sky.

Rosa would no longer be falling off of horses. Instead, she would bag the manure of the circus animals and sell it to villagers.

Pass through me, I'll remain, I'll wait, pass through me, / but where you pass through me I cannot know.

We carry within us the greatest secret in life.

Here is the photograph. It was taken on the day my father came out of the Diyarbakır Prison.

left and right cigarettes lit, burnt out / each drag starts with my love,

from the very beginning some people said that it was a disorder.

She woke up long before the alarm.

The roads I walked didn't tire me,

I won't talk anymore, I won't say harsh words in the morning for a dream I embroider a flower of pearl on my bosom.

And in the desert between the two rivers the battle which had been going on for many days continued.

Here and in many other places, İstanbul was preparing for the May Day rallies.

A huge army clad in black suddenly spreads over the horizon; it approaches at a gallop, full speed, and attacks just like that, without warning.

You are water. / You are afraid of and for the stones you will strike as you flow.

Purify your tongue and all you’ve seen / Gather your illuminated words onto snow white paper

After grasping the games and their rules / The fatigue of participation becomes less and less bearable.

Heaven rains down bread in little hard crumbs of dough, and whoever catches them may either become happy or choke on them.

Flying into the field of cloudsWith the taste of sun and waterThere is no night out thereNight does not fall in the distanceA silver cage around my neckLike an unfaithful concubineI lay down and curled…

We had to walk. This necessity made me happy. I hadn't been this happy for a long while, I thought.

I do not know what to say to you, said the director. Therefore I shall say nothing.